On Friday, September 7, 7-8:30pm two outstanding poets — Marvin Bell and Anita Endrezze — will read at the Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, WA). This is our first collaboration with the Whatcom Museum, and promises to be an event you won’t want to miss.

The Poet As Art reading Sept. 7 and workshop Sept. 8 (Click to see the full size.)

The reading will be at the Whatcom Museum’s Old City Hall (121 Prospect Street, Bellingham) in the Rotunda Room, a perfect place to hear poetry.

The award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Anita Endrezze will share their poems at this event. The evening will include poems read by both poets, and a slide show of Endrezze’s art. The Whatcom Poetry Series and Whatcom Museum are co-hosting this special poetry reading, with a suggested donation of $5 in support of the museum.

Marvin Bell is the renowned author of 23 books. His The Book of the Dead Man created a national sensation, and the publisher of Mars Being Red and other collections is Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend—where Bell and his wife have a home and spend part of each year.

Anita Endrezze, who lives in Washington, is a Native American writer widely respected for both her poetry and her fiction. Her book Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon, published by the University of Arizona Press, uses poetry, stories and her own artwork to represent her Yaqui Indian heritage. As a poet and visual artist, Endrezze will discuss the collaborative, creative process that runs between poetry and art.

More about the Poetry, Fiction, and Essays ofMarvin Bell

Marvin Bell (photo by Jason Bell)

Marvin Bell has been called “an insider who thinks like an outsider,” and his writing has been called “ambitious without pretension.” He was for many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His former students cover a wide range of aesthetics and include Denis Johnson, Juan Felipe Herrera, Marilyn Chin, Larry Levis, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Michael Burkard, Albert Goldbarth, Joy Harjo, Mark Jarman, David St. John, Thomas Lux, Patricia Hampl, Kimiko Hahn, Stephen Kuusisto and James Tate. He served two terms as the state of Iowa’s first Poet Laureate. He currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program based at Pacific University in Oregon.

He has collaborated with composers, musicians, dancers and other writers, and is the originator of a form known as the “Dead Man” poem. His 23 books include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, Whiteout, a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, and a children’s picture book from Candlewick Press (illustrations by Chris Raschka) based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag”—all released in 2011. A CD is forthcoming of a song cycle, “The Animals,” commissioned by composer David Gompper. His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Poetry Review, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Bell designed and ran for five years a program for teachers from America SCORES. He edited poetry for five years for The North American Review at its rebirth and for two years for The Iowa Review at its inception, and he conceived and edited an annual series for Lost Horse Press called New Poets / Short Books. Mr. Bell lives mainly in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. Click here to see an eleven minute video interview with Bell about writing in the “On the Fly” series..

Writing in The Georgia Review, Judith Kitchen said about Bell’s poetry, “These new books by Marvin Bell are sending poetry into new and original territory. Bell has redefined poetry as it is being practiced today.” From a review of an earlier book: “Bell’s poems, beyond their formal mastery, constitute an admirable project whose interrogations run deep.” —Poetry

Anita Endrezze is a writer, poet, teacher, and artist. Her next book, a short story collection called Butterfly Moon, will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2012. She also has a new chapbook of poems, Breaking Edges, from Red Bird Press in 2011. Her previous publications include: Throwing fire at the Sun, water at the Moon (University of Arizona Press, 2000), at the helm of twilight (Broken Moon Press, 1992), Bjerget og Skystaanden (CD-Forlag, 1986), Lune d’Ambre (Rougerie, 1991), and three other books. Her work has been translated into ten languages: Farsi, Danish, French, German, Macedonian, and Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Catalonian, and Spanish. A recent broadside from Red Bird Press featured her poem “K.I.A,” along with artist James Autio. She speaks Danish and some Spanish.

Endrezze has won the Washington State Writers Award, the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Award, an Artist Trust Gap Award, and 1st place in the Washington Poetry Society Contest. She was a two-year appointee for the Washington State Humanities Commission in their Inquiring Mind Speaker series. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University, and a B.A. in English, with an emphasis on Secondary Education. She’s taught high school, college, university and in the Poets in the Schools.

Voices of the Desert by Anita Endrezze

Her writing appears in dozens of anthologies, such as Carriers of the Dream Wheel, Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, Talking Leaves, Blue Dawn, Red Earth, and Earth Song, Sky Spirit. She also has an essay in a book of autobiographical essays, Here First. Her work is also in many literary magazines.

As an artist, her paintings have graced book covers, such as Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, as well as illustrations for her own book covers. She’s had exhibitions in England, Wales, and the US. Endrezze is half-Yaqui Indian, Slovenian, north Italian, German-Swiss.

Village Books will be present at the Whatcom Museum to sell the books of both authors. Paintings by Anita Endrezze will also be available.

Information about the workshop to be taught by Marvin Bell will be in the next blog post coming next week. Please email Jim Bertolino (jim@jamesbertolino.com) for details and to register for the workshop.

Well, blog posters are generally late. So am I. This is about the GeekGirlCon at the Seattle Conference Center tomorrow and Sunday, August 11 and 12, 2012. My daughter Angela, a tech writer and comic artist, and I, a poet and artist, will be showing our latest work, as well as some of our other things. It’s extra geeky because we’re doing a mother/daughter table. But Angela is a hoot, and I’m sure we’ll have a great weekend.

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For this show, I’ve made eleven new, but small, assemblages. All are less than a foot in any direction. I find that very funny because of the 3 by 4 foot linoleum block I printed with a small army of Bellingham lady artists in Anacortes last weekend. If you’re one of my FB friends, then check my Facebook page for a good look at the print and some of the artists. Anyway, the new assemblages are small and affordable original artworks. A frame with a six inch border would make them look pretty fine on any wall. The thing about these assemblages is that this weekend I’m selling them at studio prices or below. If any don’t sell, I’ll bring them back to the studio for framing, and then they’ll never be priced as low as they will be this weekend. If you’re in Seattle this weekend looking for a visually stimulating experience, stop by GeekGirlCon. Angela and I are at table 314. Come and see us.